Search form

Jaime Fuller

Recent Articles

Today, Bradley Manning was found guilty of violating the Espionage Act by releasing hundreds of thousands of documents from the military and the State Department to WikiLeaks in 2011. Though Manning had already pled guilty to some charges, the government wanted to convict him not only of violating classification rules, but of something far more serious, and on that, they failed. And a good thing, too. The government had essentially charged Manning with treason, but since the Constitution sets a high bar for that crime, they called it "aiding the enemy." The rationale was that since Manning must surely have been aware that al Qaeda reads the internet, when he gave the documents to WikiLeaks he was for all intents and purposes giving them to al Qaeda. The judge, while convicting Manning on the Espionage Act charges, found him not guilty of aiding the enemy. It's one thing to have only limited sympathy for Manning—after all, he didn't just leak evidence of government malfeasance, he...

During the dog days of summer, most peoples' lazier impulses take over, even more so in Washington, a muggy city built ill-advisedly on top of a swamp. President Obama, however, seems immune to the soporific effects of the heat and is filling up the days with speech after speech of ambitious agenda-making. Last week saw the kick-off of a new five-point economic plan. A few weeks before that, in a speech mostly forgotten by the amnesiatic chattering class (but not so far away as his national security speech, which seems so long ago to be nearly nonexistent), Obama laid out his administration's plan for the environment, a distillation of his views on climate change heard before only in soundbites. Much of that speech was devoted to initiatives that, like the Affordable Care Act, will burn on a slow fuse. EPA standards and weaning the country off coal are important, but we won't see how they affect the environment until decades from now. Because of the tortoise-like pace of climate...

There are a number of divisions within the GOP today, many of which are more about strategy than substance. For instance, Karl Rove is trying to get the party to avoid nominating more people like Todd "legitimate rape" Akin for office, not because he has any particular disagreement with what those people would advocate if elected, but because he thinks they tend to lose. Other forces within the conservative movement believe that the best thing is always to support the most conservative candidate, and now regard Rove as a squish who has betrayed their cause. But there is at least one rift in the GOP that is based almost entirely on a substantive policy disagreement: the division on national security matters between the libertarians (or sometime libertarians, anyway), who are troubled by Bush/Obama policies on things like drone strikes and surveillance of the American population, and what we might call the neocons, those who are just fine with everything that has been done in the last...

Ever since President Obama and other Democrats began working on the Affordable Care Act back in 2009, there was a simple hearts-and-minds fight between them and their opponents over the law. Democrats said, "This is going to be great!" while Republicans said, "This is going to be terrible!" As a citizen, you could believe either one of them, or neither, or a little of both. This coming October, however, enrollment will begin in the new insurance exchanges established by the law, with coverage taking effect on January 1st. At that point, in addition to trying to influence the public's opinions, the administration will be trying to affect their behavior. In particular, the administration will be trying to encourage young people—many of whom don't get insurance through their jobs, and who often believe that they'll never get sick or in an accident—to sign up for coverage. You won't have to work as hard to convince a 60-year-old with diabetes to get covered; Obamacare is just what he's...

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite S usannah Shakow's first impression of high-school junior Tristana Giunta was that she was awkward. "Like, couldn’t-look-you-in-the-eye kind of awkward," Shakow says. Giunta was attending the first annual Young Women's Political Leadership conference in Washington, D.C.—the flagship program offered by Running Start, which Shakow, a lawyer with experience pushing women into politics, started to get girls excited about governing; excited enough to run for office. The Young Women’s Political Leadership conference is a boot-camp where high-school women learn the ingredients that make a great politician. They take Networking 101, Fundraising 101, and Public Speaking 101. They get first-hand knowledge of how Washington works from women who have been playing the game for ages. Girls learn there are dozens of people their age just as ambitious and as hungry to run for office as they are. Despite her shy demeanor, Giunta soaked up an impressive amount of campaign...